Let’s say I’m on a French train enroute to meet my boyfriend, a prominent French writer. I open that day’s copy of Le Monde and there’s a controlling, erotic story by him about an unnamed woman who, just like me, is traveling aboard a French train. Among other items, the story contains detailed instructions to pleasure myself in the W.C., precisely between Paris and Niort. What’s more, he’s created this gift for me, he explains in the story, under the guise of obsessive love and performative literature.
In reaction I might think: 1) he’s a controlling jerk; or, maybe 2) this is cheesey, high-falutin French porn. But I think I’d go with he’s an interesting and complicated guy. A guy just like French novelist and filmmaker Emmanuel Carrère, whose real 8,000-word missive to his live-in girlfriend Sophie in Le Monde features as the switchpoint in this superb memoir.
Considered one of France’s masters of psychological suspense, Carrère’s books include the chilling true crime account The Adversary, and a quirky biography of Phillip K. Dick. This time Carrère takes on himself, creating, he said in post-publication interviews, “variable-geometry autobiography,” in My Life as a Russian Novel.
In this slender volume Carrère masterfully connects the pieces in his epic messy life between 2000 and 2002. Newly single and 43, he accepts a film assignment that will take him briefly to Russia. Soon he begins ping ponging between the post-Soviet town of Kotelnich and a turbulent relationship he’s recently begun with the much younger Sophie in Paris. As in any really good Russian novel, his elegant prose travels the territories of passion and obsession, trust and betrayal, secrets and lies, with lots of vodka to take the edge off.
Carrère’s tale and his Chinese-puzzle-box approach to its telling fascinates me. Maybe it’s because I’m writing a memoir about a tough year in 1997 I spent living eight train stops away from Kotelnich. I remember well being on overheated night trains with “Downtown” and other ancient hits wafting through the train’s sound system. Like Carrère, I was 43 when I went to Russia with my now former husband, an academic, and our baby. I’d been a journalist and was used to taking risks, personal and professional. This time I’d hedged my bets that the year might help me sort out my own messy life; but, once there, found myself falling down the rabbit hole.
In a nod to Pirandello, My Life As a Russian Novel unfolds as Carrère, the author, searches for a plot and characters. He builds the memoir around a series of train trips he makes to Kotelnich to film two different documentaries. His initial Russian experiences trigger his obsessive need to examine his own past and present life, including his mutually destructive relationship with Sophie. His telling of that search becomes the memoir’s “plot.”
The book opens with an erotic dream as he takes his first night train from Moscow to Kotelnich, a bleak whistlestop along the Trans-Siberian Railway, about 541 miles northeast of the Russian capital. A tiny river port town, Kotelnich is the kind of place deep in Russia’s heartland, Carrère notes, where someone could vanish in a dungeon with no one to hear their screams. He and his film crew are headed there to shoot a documentary on Russia’s last World War II P.O.W., a Hungarian who’d been discovered living in the town’s mental asylum for 53 years. The soldier had never learned Russian and was essentially speechless throughout his entire institutionalization.
The Hungarian’s story sparks Carrère’s desire to find closure with the disappearance of his own Georgian maternal grandfather, a collaborator whom the French Resistance nabbed in Bordeaux at the end of World War II and whose body was never found. The heavy veil of family secrecy surrounding his grandfather’s vanishing weighs on Carrère’s already troubled psyche. His mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encauste, has carefully guarded the secret to protect her reputation as one of France’s most respected historians of Russia, and as the Permanent Secretary of the auguste Académie Française. In a Doestoevsky moment, she forbids her son to write about her father until after her death. Carrère dismisses her fears, insisting that truth will release them.
It’s a chilly autumn and the pale birch trees have already lost their leaves when Carrère and his small French film crew arrive at Kotelnich’s decrepit train station. During this initial Kotelnich sojourn, Carrère and crew meet a cast of characters including an elusive FSB agent [the Federal Security Bureau is the KGB’s successor] with an “alcoholic apparatchik mug” and his girlfriend, trained as a French interpreter. She clings to her collection of French pop song tapes like a life raft just beyond her grasp.
Eventually, after a week or so of greasy pelmeni, rot-gut vodka, no heat, menacing skinheads, and pulsing Russian techno music, the crew gets back on the train and Carrère returns to Paris, clean sheets, good wine and Sophie.
Despite the comforts of home, however, Kotelnich haunts Carrère and he senses one day he’ll return, because Kotelnich is where “you can be found when you have disappeared.” Eighteen months later, Carrère is back there with a crew but without a script. He’s not worried at first, believing the story will find them. He also believes relearning Russian, the language of his childhood in Paris, will help unlock his imaginary prison cell. Yet as his fluency improves, he becomes almost aphasaic in his interactions with residents in Kotelnich. It’s a smokescreen, he thinks, keeping him from the truth he seeks. The resulting footage they shoot in the town is aimless and they return to Paris. Then a grisly double murder grimly offers Retour à Kotelnich a story structure.
Once that film is firmly under his belt, Carrère turns his lens back on the relationship with Sophie. When his special Le Monde gift for her takes an unexpected turn, the rest of the memoir intricately unrolls. [The story, This Is for You, also published in GRANTA 110: Sex/Fiction issue, Spring 2010, makes more sense in the context of the memoir.]
I read My Life As a Russian Novel, absorbing all that Carrère offered up. He captures the dystopia of post-Soviet Russia so well. Beyond the fairy tale sparkle of Moscow or St. Petersburg lies a parallel universe that often seems borrowed from a Twilight Zone episode, depending on whether it’s a Good Russia Day or Bad Russia Day. He gets the indomitable spirit of ordinary Russians and the pathos of their situation in the former U.S.S.R.
We left no permanent address behind in Boston and our future plans were yet to be mapped when we moved to the old Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod. I’d planned to write about the year, but didn’t have a plot and waited for the story to develop. Some of it came to light while living in the former military and research hub that had been a closed city to foreigners until the mid-1990s. The rest played out over time. When we arrived in Nizhny about 35 Americans―25 of whom were Christian missionaries―and a handful of other nationals, lived in the city of about a million inhabitants. Russian was the lingua franca and you needed to speak it to survive and thrive. We were usually the first Westerners and Americans that Russians met, especially in small towns. The upshot of these “first contact” encounters with Russian was in the end we had more in common with each other than what set us apart.
This book hit home on several fronts. I felt confident being able to keep my son well and healthy in Russia. A couple of times I did fear for our personal safety but mostly I always carried a below-the-radar anxiety of vanishing without a trace, as Carrère detailed in a nightmare he describes. People vanished all the time in Nizhny, including an older, Canadian/Polish colleague of my husband. There was an irony in his disappearance because he liked to translate the “missing persons” column for me in Nizhny’s daily newspaper over coffee. He eventually showed up a week later with a box of dark chocolates from Lodz and a deep apology; he’d impulsively hopped on a train to Poland to visit an old girlfriend. But others weren’t as lucky.
While reading the book, I was struck by the mirrors within mirrors and the way coincidences, if they are coincidences, occur. We had döpplegangers in Nizhny: another couple from California with a baby boy the same age as our son. Russians frequently mistook each couple, or wife, or husband or baby for the other during the months we overlapped. When we said goodbye on a snowy April day for their return to Southern California, I thought we’d never see them again as we’d hoped to return to the East Coast. There was no further contact between us. Fast forward to late summer 1998, a few weeks after we’d left Russia. We were finishing French toast on a hotel patio in Santa Barbara, California, when our döpplegangers magically appeared. Both families, it turned out, had been visiting family in the area.We were all speechless on that patio except for the little boys, now toddlers, who ran to each other giggling in between bits of English and Russian.
Carrère’s situation in Russia was very different from that of my own, but the threads around language in his memoir struck a chord. I couldn’t speak Russian when I arrived in Nizhny and felt mute for months until my language skills marginally improved. The experience triggered painful memories of a childhood speech impediment and deepened my feelings of loneliness. At the same time I felt voiceless outside of our tiny apartment, I also had problems communicating in my own troubled relationship.
Like Carrère, part of my family is from Russia. They weren’t aristocrats as were his ancestors (one of his grand uncles was a vice-governor of the Vyatka-Kotelnich region). Rather, mine were Russian Jews and fled Czarist Russia for America. I never felt an ancestral connection with Russia while living there, nor did Carrère during his visits to Kotelnich or Moscow. But I sometimes thought about the symmetry that, near the end of the same century in which my relatives had fled Russia, I escaped there.
In a tiny town like Kotelnich, Carrère and his small band of Frantsuzki’s stood out like aliens. Yet, even in a large city such as Nizhny, so did I. The baby backpack (our döpplegangers had one, too) was a gawker magnet. As well most Russians found it odd I had silver hair and wasn’t interested in the L’Oréal boxes now available at the indoor market. The combination of my silver hair and a baby was a complete cultural disconnect for many Russians. I was frequently asked where my son’s mother was. It made logical sense in a country where most women are grandmothers in their early 40s. But I kept my hair silver and clung to my identity as a new mother. So much else of who I was kept disappearing.
Like Carrère’s maternal grandfather, mine mysteriously vanished, too, although not until the mid-1950s and in San Francisco, California. His body was never found. He’d been a journalist. I didn’t know him, but his disappearance must weigh heavily on my mother, his only child. Her sunny disposition rarely hints at hidden sorrow. Still it’s the kind of sadness that gets silently passed on to each succeeding generation, Carrère notes in stronger terms, because the grieving process never quite kicks in without true closure.
Carrère’s writing is indeed raw and brave. Yes, he’s full of bragadoccio and smug in a literary, haute bourgeois Parisian kind of way. Ouch when he describes how Sophie doesn’t really fit into his world, where people don’t need to request vacation hours in advance from their boss. His friends, he explains, are their own bosses. But he’s inerrringly honest, painfully at times, about his behavior with Sophie, his family, and friends. And it’s his unflinching frankness and willingness to put himself and those around him on the line that keeps you turning each page.
I love the fresh and original way he structures his memoir compared with a more formulaic bent of many American ones. I couldn’t imagine this narrative, with its complicated weaving in and out of threads, to be packaged in a conventional trajectory. And perhaps it’s because my flashbacks of Russia are in black and white that I wondered if Carrère had engaged in some literary wizardry that kept me, while reading his memoir, visualizing the Russia parts always in shades of grey while the parts in France were in technicolor.
When the book was first published in France (2007) as Un Roman Russe, and later in Britain (2010) as A Russian Novel, reviewers believed it to be a work of fiction. That was until Carrère in subsequent interviews revealed that it was, indeed, a memoir and that most of the events were true. In North America, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company published it as My Life As a Russian Novel: A Memoir.
Following the book’s publication in Britain, Carrère publicly defended his right to defy his mother and tell his grandfather’s story. That begs the question that so many of the current crop of memoirs pose: How much of your own story do you own as a writer and when do you transgress on the rights of others in your desire to be authentic? In Carrère’s case, he revealed to The Guardian in 2010 that his mother wasn’t speaking to him following the book’s publication. And Sophie, he explained, while initially okay with the manuscript, now also wasn’t speaking to him. He confessed that he still felt “uneasy” about exposing his life with her.
By contrast, reception to his documentary Retour à Kotelnich was decidedly different at a small screening Carrère holds in the town. The mother of the murder victim blesses, curses, then blesses Carrère. The victim’s boyfriend, however, is sanguine. At the end of the film, he tells Carrère: “It’s good. And what’s particularly good is that you talk about your grandfather, your own story. You didn’t just come here looking for our unhappiness, you brought your own along. And that I like.”
I brought bits of my own unhappiness with me to Russia, but in the course of meeting wonderful, resilient people who were trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances, I learned to understand my own resiliency. Perhaps Carrère reached a similar understanding. After reading My Life As A Russian Novel I realize that, like him, Russia was a place I had to get lost in to be found.
